Perhaps more realistic are some of the technologies outlined in the Institute of Mechanical engineers report ‘Geo-Engineering – Giving us time to act?’.  This report discusses three technologies which are, more or less, possible now.

1. Artificial trees are machines which remove CO2 from the air, similar to the carbon capture devices advocated for power stations.  These can be placed anywhere, perhaps beside a motorway, or in the middle of the North Sea, where the carbon captured could be stored in depleted oil wells.
2. Growing algae on the sides of buildings would sequester carbon, with the resulting green goop used as biofuel, which could be burnt to biochar and later buried or stored underground, as well as insulating the building and reducing heating costs.  Although its hard to imagine these photobioreactors really operating on a global scale, it could allow buildings become net carbon absorbers.
3. Finally, the idea of increasing the albedo of buildings to reflect more sunlight back into space is an idea which has been around ever since the first villager in a hot country somewhere figured out limewash and painted her house with it.  If applied to our modern sprawling cities, using uptodate highly reflective coverings, it would at least have a local effect.

From a Green perspective, should we just reject these technologies out of hand, or should we consider them as part of a balanced climate change strategy, along with power down emission reductions?

If, over the last 10-20 years that climate change has been seen as a major issue, carbon levels had at least started to come down, I’d say ignore all this.  It’s an oil industry conspiracy to keep on with business as usual.  But the truth is that the Green movement, party and campaigning organisations alike has been spectacularly ineffective at making any dent on global emissions.   In the UK, we’ve reduced ours slightly since Kyoto in 1990, first by putting everyone onto gas heating and more recently by outsourcing our emissions to China.  Even with all that, last year we managed a whopping 1.7% reduction.

We need ways of not just reducing emissions but of rolling back the damage already done.  We desperately need time to adjust to a low-carbon world.  These technologies could give us time, and a way of cleaning up.

The difficulty for any Green is that they could give us more than that.  If (and its a big if) they fulfill their promise, then our high-consumption, growth obsessed world could continue a while longer, at least until the next resource blockage is reached.

A Green approach then has to consider a number of factors:

• Will the technologies work?  Research spent on something that doesn’t is research not spent elsewhere.
• Will they have undesirable side effects, both environmental and economic?
• Are they sustainable?
• Is there an ethical concern?

The technologies which simply reduce warming (eg all the albedo increasing ideas) a symptomatic fix that does not get at root causes, and do not address the other effects of increased greenhouse gases.  In particular, they do not address the problem of ocean acidification.  Space mirrors and the like should be avoided, at least until its clear there is no alternative.

However Greens should support the idea of making buildings more reflective to reduce emissions by reducing the need for aircon, and perhaps to reduce local increases in temperature (urban heat island effect).  This isn’t likely to have much effect on a global scale (see table 1 in Lenton and Vaughan (2009) ).

The idea of algae-based biophotoreactors should be seriously considered too.   Most Green objections to biofuels have to do with the displacement of food crops, particularly in the developing world, and with unknown consequences of biochar.  Algae, grown in tubes on the sides of buildings, or perhaps along roadsides or even in highly saline areas, don’t raise this objection.  Unknown consequences should be researched, not abandoned in fear.

Because the artificial trees are an air capture and storage technology, and cost the same to capture carbon no matter how that carbon was originally emitted, they will effectively put an upper limit on amount paid for any emission reduction strategy.   At the moment, they’re expensive, but it will come down and then noone will want to invest in renewables, changing transport patterns or anything else.   If it works, all the other problems associated with fossil fuel dependency – peak oil, dependence on problematic suppliers, use of all those lovely molecules just to burn them – won’t go away.

Greens may therefore be reluctant to consider them, but if they actually work, they will give us time we desperately need.   They’re worth a funding bet right now, and perhaps the chance of slowly coming off fossil fuels..

Geo-engineering contains some frightening possibilities, but, as the Royal Society said in their report on the state of the technology last week, we’re as much  in danger of prematurely dismissing useful techniques as we are of promoting dangerous proposals.

When our grandchildren ask us why we didn’t just stop burning the oil, I don’t want to have tell them that not only did we see it coming and do very little, we abandoned the search for ways to clean up after ourselves.

I saw this fabulous response by the Climate Campers to the Metropolitan Police’s request to know where they’re doing the camp this week on the Daily Maybe.

If you, like me, are busy at work on Wednesday, not really into camping and perhaps a little nervous, then  send them a donation to help all the costs that come with being the most successful climate change protest group around.  Think of it as a carbon offset programme!

Looking at the new projections for London’s climate later this century, it really doesn’t sound too bad.  If I get to spend my old age in the climate of my childhood, while staying here in London, I’ll be quite happy.  It sounds like the sea may even be a lot closer (or at least the Thames rather wider).

And perhaps this is why its so hard to get anyone to understand the urgency of the situation we face.  If London is like Auckland, that’s not so bad, even if the tube floods, and the capital decamps to Leeds (the suggestion that the industrial revolution was a Yorkist plot is one of the more bizarre, and best, I’ve heard lately.  It’s worth spreading:-) )

But if our summer temperatures rise by 4-5 degrees, people in the South will be dying in their millions.  There will be no more ice, and the sea level will rise inexorably.  Those who can least cope will be most effected.  Having done so little to reduce the risk of global warming, our government seems to have quietly moved to an ‘adapt’ strategy.  That may be realistic, but is there really no way to motivate people to cut down their energy use and address the problem that’s staring us in the face?

What will it take to make us realise the ferocious urgency of today?

1989 Minimum Sea Ice

Then look at this for September 2007.

2007 Minimum Sea Ice

Then go and visit the good people at NASA, and see how it’s shaping up for 2008.   The ice cover has been retreating at about 10% per decade, and its accelerating.  It’s not just the melting ice, its the change from nice, white, stuff sitting at the top of the planet reflecting all that energy back into space to dark blue stuff absorbing it and getting hotter.   Any minute now, the Arctic will be an open sea for the first time in human history.

An update on climate research remotivates me in a big stick followed by small carrot sort of a way.

The stick was administered by Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, who has just published a paper* on targets for emission reduction.  We talk about reducing emissions by 60% by 2050, but that is meaningless.  The planet can only support so much CO2, so we need to worry about the total amount in the atmosphere, not some future rate of increase.  This means that we are almost certainly heading for a 2C increase in global temperature whatever happens, and 4C is likely.  We might be okay, maybe.  Bangladesh and Tuvalu will not.

Even limiting CO2 in the atmosphere to 650ppmv, and a likely 4C increase, requires us to start cutting emissions drastically now, rather than letting them keep on rising as they have ever since Rio in 1992.   If the coming recession is drastic (on the scale of the collapse of the economy of the Soviet Union) we might manage it, but there doesn’t seem to be any other way it will happen.

We have to change now.  Fortunately, the Center for Alternative Technology believes its possible, and has a plan for doing it.  Its not a detailed, do this on Monday, this on Tuesday type of plan which is what we really need, but it does show a way.  They show how the UK could be self-sufficient in renewable energy, providing we both reduce demand and invest heavily in renewables now.

So, we know the problem.  We have ideas about the solution.  Now, its finding the will to do something about it.

* Kevin Anderson  and Alice Bows
Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trendsPhil. Trans. R. Soc. A November 13, 2008 366:3863-3882;  doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138

But, if you use that excuse, consider this. China has, in the last twenty years, turned from a backward, poverty ridden nation, to a powerhouse economy. It has done that without worrying about planning regulations, human rights or any of the other, deeply desirable, ideas that may slow the West’s ability to respond to the need to reduce carbon. Its geography means that it may suffer more than Britain will, with encroaching deserts and sea level rise threatening delta and coastal cities. Its bright youth study engineering and science.

The first hydrogen refueling plant has opened in Beijing, and will be used for fueling a hydrogen vehicle fleet for the 2008 Olympics.

If China, its government and power brokers, decide that they will reduce their own carbon emissions, and perhaps use their economic power to encourage others to do so, they will do it, and quickly.

It is complacent, and somehow patronising, to assume that China will fail to recognise the problems its industrial revolution and economic boom are causing and, having recognised them, will fail to deal with them. We, who have had 200 years of industrialisation, need to look to our own dirty back yard now, before we are passed by in this as well.